ALEXANDRIA TWP. – Most of the items in Delaware Valley Regional High School’s Lost & Found are pretty much what you’d expect. But the front-office staff has a favorite.
It’s a rhinestone-studded, women’s size-8, open-toed shoe, silver with a 2-inch heel. It was found in the Hutchins gym after this year’s Homecoming Dance. Attendance secretary Tracy Stephan explains with a smile, “It’s the Cinderella slipper.”
Child study team secretary Janet O’Connor says, “Every year there’s a Cinderella slipper, and it’s always silver, too.”
Unlikely as that sounds, Kathy Lovering, secretary to the athletic director, confirms that has been the case for at least the past four years.
Unlike the Homecoming dance, the prom is held off-site, so any leftover footwear from those soirees goes unrecovered.
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Minimal wear on the stray shoe’s sole indicates that Cinderella bought it for the dance, wore it through the balloon arch into the gym and then kicked it off for unimpeded dancing.
When it came time to put her shoes back on, she couldn’t find this one. Or maybe, in the throes of a teen crisis of the heart, she fled the dance in disarray.
“Or maybe she left it there deliberately so Prince Charming will come find her,” suggests Denise Donnelly, administrative assistant to the principal.
If that’s the case, she limped home for nothing. The chic shoe has gone unclaimed.
Tracy Stephan works at the front desk, so her view includes the generally drab offerings of the Lost & Found – old jackets, lunch boxes, used notebooks, hats, odd gloves and lots of cinch sacks, whose contents have never been inspected.
But the silver slipper has been deemed too elegant for such mundane company, and it has a place of honor deeper into the offices. “We put it on a shelf so it wouldn’t get recycled,” said Stephan.
So there it sits. If Cinderella wants her shoe, she’ll have to come to the main office and try it on. Staff romanticism aside, the school district does not have the resources to search the realm for her.
This item was submitted by Rick Epstein.
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